by B. M. Bower
“Don’t you move until I tell you to,” he commanded her harshly, and ran back, diving into the thick of the crowd as though he were charging into a football scrimmage.
“Who was it called me back to fight? Put up your guns,—or keep them if you like. It’s all one to me!”
In the dim light he saw the gleam of a weapon raised before him, reached out and wrenched it away from the owner, and threw it far over his shoulder into the weeds. “Who said a Lorrigan run? I want that man!”
“I said it,” bellowed a whisky-flushed man whose face was strange to him. “I said it, and I say it agin. I say—a Lorrigan!”
He lifted his gun above the pressure of excited men and women. Lance sprung upward and forward, landed on some one’s foot, lunged again and got a grip on the hand that held the gun. With his left hand he wrenched the gun away. With his right he pulled the man free of the crowd and out where there was room. The crowd—men, now, for the women had fled shrieking—surged that way.
“Stand back there! I’ll settle with this fellow alone.” He held the other fast, his arms as merciless as the grip of a grizzly, and called aloud:
“This is a Lorrigan dance, and the Lorrigans are going to have order. Those of you who brought chips on your shoulders, and whisky to soak the chips in, can drink your whisky and do your fighting among yourselves, off the Lorrigan ranch. We all came here to have fun. There’s music and room to dance, and plenty of chuck and plenty of coffee, and the dance is going right on without any fuss whatever.
“This poor boob here who thinks he wants to fight me just because I’m a Lorrigan, I never saw before. It wouldn’t be a fair fight, because he’s too drunk to do anything but make a fool of himself. There’s nothing to fight about, anyway. A fellow was carrying two cups of boiling hot coffee, and he stubbed his toe, and some one got scalded a little. That’s nothing to break up a dance over. The rest of you heard the noise and jumped at the conclusion there was trouble afoot. There isn’t. I think you all want to go on with the dance and have a good time, except perhaps a few who are drunk. They are at liberty to go off somewhere and beat each other up to their hearts’ content. Come on, now, folks—get your partners for a square dance—and everybody dance!”
His voice had held them listening. His words were not the words of a coward, yet they were a plea for peace, they seemed reasonable even to the half-drunken ones who had been the readiest to fight. The old-time range slogan, “Everybody dance!” sent three or four hurrying to find the girls they wanted. The trouble, it would appear, had ended as suddenly as it had begun and for a moment the tension relaxed.
The drunken one was still cursing, struggling unavailingly to tear himself away from Lance so that he could land a blow. Lance, looking out across the crowd, caught Belle’s glance and nodded toward the schoolhouse. Belle hurried away to find the musicians and set them playing, and a few couples strayed after her. But there were men who stayed, pushing, elbowing to see what would happen when Lance Lorrigan loosened his hold on the Jumpoff man.
Lance did not loosen his hold, however. He saw Tom, Al, three or four Devil’s Tooth men edging up, and sent them a warning shake of his head.
“Who knows this fellow? Where does he belong? I think his friends had better take care of him until he sobers up.”
“We’ll take care of him,” said another stranger, easing up to Lance. “He won’t hurt yuh; he was only foolin’, anyway. Bill Kennedy, he always gits kinda happy when he’s had one or two.”
There was laughter in the crowd. Two or three voices were heard muttering together, and other laughs followed. Some one produced a bottle and offered the pugnacious one a drink. Lance let him go with a contemptuous laugh and went to where the Devil’s Tooth men now stood bunched close together, their backs to the chuck-wagon.
“We’ll have to clean up this crowd, before it’s over,” Al was saying to his father. “Might as well start right in and git ’er over with.”
“And have it said the Lorrigans can’t give a dance without having it end in rough-house!” Lance interrupted. “Cut out the idea of fighting that bunch. Keep them out of the house and away from the women, and let them have their booze down in the grove. That’s where I’ve seen a lot of them heading. Come on, boys; it takes just as much nerve not to fight as it does to kill off a dozen men. Isn’t that right, dad?”
“More,” said Tom laconically. “No, boys, we don’t want no trouble here. Come on in and dance. That’s yore job—to keep ’er moving peaceable. I’ll fire any man I ketch drinking Jumpoff booze. We’ve got better at the ranch. Come on!”
He led the way and his men followed him,—not as though they were particularly anxious to avoid trouble, but more like men who are trained to obey implicitly a leader who has some definite purpose and refuses to be turned from it. Lance, walking a few steps in the rear, wondered at the discipline his father seemed to maintain without any apparent effort.
“And they say the Lorrigans are a tough outfit!” he laughed, when he had overtaken Tom. “Dad, you’ve got the bunch trained like soldiers. I was more afraid our boys would rough things up than I was worried over the stews.”
“Shucks! When we rough things up, it’s when we want it rough. Al, he was kinda excited. But at that, we may have to hogtie a few of them smart Alecks from town, before we can dance peaceable.”
Mary Hope, Lance discovered, was already in the schoolhouse. Also, several of the intoxicated were there, and the quadrille was being danced with so much zest that the whole building shook. That in itself was not unusual—Black Rim dances usually did become rather boisterous after supper—but just outside the door a bottle was being circulated freely, and two or three men had started toward the cottonwood grove for more. Duke, coming up to Lance where he stood in the doorway, pulled him to one side, where they could not be overheard.
“There’s going to be trouble here, sure’s you’re knee-high to a duck. Dad won’t let our bunch light into ’em, but they’ll be fighting amongst themselves inside an hour. You better slip it to the women that the dance breaks up early. Give ’em a few more waltzes and two-steps, Lance, and then make it Home-Sweet-Home, if you don’t want to muss up your nice city clothes,” he added, with a laugh that was not altogether friendly.
“Mussing up nice city clothes is my favorite pastime,” Lance retorted, and went inside again to see who was doing all the whooping. The chief whooper, he discovered, was Bill Kennedy, the man whom he had very nearly thrashed. Mary Hope was looking her Scotch primmest. Lance measured the primness, saw that there was a vacant space beside her, and made his precarious way toward it, circling the dancers who swung close to the benches and trod upon the toes of the wall flowers in their enthusiasm. He reached the vacant space and sat down just in time to receive Bill Kennedy in his lap. But Bill was too happy just then to observe whose lap he landed in, and bounced up with a bellowing laugh to resume his gyrations.
“Don’t dance any more, girl,” Lance said, leaning so that he could make himself heard without shouting in the uproar. “It’s getting pretty wild—and it will be wilder. They must have hauled it out in barrels!”
Mary Hope looked at him, but she did not smile, did not answer.
“I’m sorry the secret is no nicer,” Lance went on. “Now the floor will have to be scrubbed before a lady girl can come out and teach school here. I thought it would be great to have a house-warming dance,—but they’re making it too blamed warm!”
Some one slipped and fell, and immediately there was a struggling heap where others had fallen over the first. There were shrieks of laughter and an oath or two, an epithet and then a loud-flung threat.
Lance started up, saw that Tom and Al were heading that way, and took Mary Hope by the arm.
“It’s time little girls like you went home,” he said smiling, and somehow got her to the door without having her trampled upon. “Where are your wraps?”
“There,” said Mary Hope dazedly, and pointed to the corner behind them, wh
ere cloaks, hoods, hats and two sleeping children were piled indiscriminately.
Through the doorway men were crowding, two or three being pushed out only to be pushed in again by others eager to join the mêlée. In the rear of the room, near the musicians, two men were fighting. Lance, giving one glance to the fight and another to the struggling mass in the doorway, pushed up the window nearest them, lifted Mary Hope and put her out on the side hill. He felt of a coat or two, chose the heaviest, found something soft and furry like a cap, and followed her. Behind the door no one seemed to look. A solid mass of backs was turned toward him when he wriggled through on his stomach.
“Where’s your horse?” he asked Mary Hope, while he slipped the coat on her and buttoned it.
“It does seem to me that a Lorrigan is always making me put on a coat!” cried Mary Hope petulantly. “And now, this isn’t mine at all!”
“A non-essential detail. It’s a coat, and that’s all that matters. Where is your horse?”
“I haven’t any horse here—oh, they’re killing each other in there! The Kennedys brought me—and he’s that drunk, now—”
“Good heck! Bill Kennedy! Well, come on. You couldn’t go back with them, that’s sure. I’ll take you home, girl.” He was leading her by the arm to the fence behind the house. “Wait, I’ll lift a wire; can you crawl under?”
“Now, I’ve torn it! I heard it rip. And it isn’t my coat at all,” said Mary Hope. “Oh, they’re murdering one another! I should think you’d be ashamed, having a dance like—”
“Coats can be bought—and murdered men don’t swear like that. I’ll have to borrow Belle’s pintos, but we don’t care, do we? Come on. Here they are. Don’t get in until I get them untied and turned around. And when I say get in, you’d better make it in one jump. Are you game?”
“No Lorrigan will ever cry shame on a Douglas for a coward! You must be crazy, taking this awful team.”
“I am. I’m crazy to get you away from here before they start shooting, back there.” He spoke to the team gruffly and with a tone of authority that held them quiet, wondering at his audacity perhaps. He untied them, got the lines, stepped in and turned them around, the pintos backing and cramping the buckboard, lunging a little but too surprised to misbehave in their usual form.
“Get in—and hang on. There’s no road much—but we’ll make it, all right.”
Like the pintos, Mary Hope was too astonished to rebel. She got in.
The team went plunging up the hill, snorting now and then, swerving sharply away from rock or bush that threatened them with vague horrors in the clear starlight. Behind them surged the clamor of many voices shouting, the confused scuffling of feet, a revolver shot or two, and threading the whole the shrill, upbraiding voice of a woman.
“That’s Mrs. Miller,” Mary Hope volunteered jerkily. “She’s the one that was scalded.”
“It wasn’t her tongue that was hurt,” Lance observed, and barely saved the buckboard from upsetting on a rock as Rosa and Subrosa shied violently and simultaneously at a rabbit scuttling from a bush before them.
He swung the pintos to the right, jounced down into some sort of trail, and let them go loping along at their usual pace.
“Belle has her own ideas about horse-training,” Lance chuckled, steadying Subrosa with a twitch of the rein. “They’ll hit this gait all the way to your ranch.”
Mary Hope gave a gasp and caught him by the arm, shaking it a little as if she were afraid that otherwise he would not listen to her. “Oh, but I canna go home! I’ve a horse and my riding clothes in Jumpoff, and I must go for them and come home properly on horseback tomorrow! It’s because of the lie I told my mother, so that I could come to the dance with the Kennedys. Set me down here anywhere, Lance Lorrigan, and let me walk until the Kennedys overtake me! They’ll be coming soon, now—as soon as Bill Kennedy gets licket sober. You can stop the horses—surely you can stop them and let me out. But please, please do not take me home tonight, in this party dress—and a coat that isna mine at all!”
“I’m not taking you home, girl. I’m taking you to Jumpoff. And it won’t matter to you whether Bill Kennedy is licked sober or not. And tomorrow I’ll find out who owns the coat. I’ll say I found it on the road somewhere. Who’s to prove I didn’t? Or if you disapprove of lying about it, I’ll bring it back and leave it beside the road.”
“It’s a lot of trouble I’m making for you,” said Mary Hope quite meekly, and let go his arm. “I should not have told the lie and gone to the dance. And I canna wear my own coat home, because it’s there in the pile behind the door, and some one else will take it. So after all it will be known that I lied, and you may as well take me home now and let me face it.”
To this Lance made no reply. But when the pintos came rattling down the hill to where the Douglas trail led away to the right, he did not slow them, did not take the turn.
Mary Hope looked anxiously toward home, away beyond the broken skyline. A star hung big and bright on the point of a certain hill that marked the Douglas ranch. While she watched it, the star slid out of sight as if it were going down to warn Hugh Douglas that his daughter had told a lie and had gone to a forbidden place to dance with forbidden people, and was even now driving through the night with one of the Lorrigans,—perchance the wickedest of all the wicked Lorrigans, because he had been away beyond the Rim and had learned the wickedness of the cities.
She looked wistfully at the face of this wickedest of the Lorrigans, his profile seen dimly in the starlight. He did not look wicked. Under his hat brim she could see his brows, heavy and straight and lifted whimsically at the inner points, as though he were thinking of something amusing. His nose was fine and straight, too,—not at all like a beak, though her father had always maintained that the Lorrigans were but human vultures. His mouth,—there was something in the look of his mouth that made her catch her breath; something tender, something that vaguely disturbed her, made her feel that it could be terribly stern if it were not so tender. He seemed to be smiling—not with his mouth, exactly, but away inside of his mind—and the smile showed just a little bit, at the corner of his lips. His chin was the Lorrigan chin absolutely; a nice chin to look at, with a little, long dimple down the middle. A chin that one would not want to oppose, would not want to see when the man who owned it was very angry.
Mary Hope had gone just so far in her analysis when Lance turned his head abruptly, unexpectedly, and looked full into her eyes.
“Don’t be afraid, girl. Don’t worry about the lie—about anything. It was a sweet little lie—it makes you just human and young and—sweet. Let them scold you, and smile, ’way down deep in your heart, and be glad you’re human enough to tell a lie now and then. Because if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be driving all these miles together to save you a little of the scolding. Be happy. Be just a little bit happy tonight, won’t you, girl—you lonely little girl—with the blue, blue eyes!”
There it was again, that vibrant, caressing note in his voice. It was there in his eyes while he looked at her, on his lips while he spoke to her. But the next moment he looked ahead at the trail, spoke to Rosa who had flung her head around to bite pettishly at Subrosa, who snapped back at her.
Mary Hope turned her face to the starlit rangeland. Again she breathed quickly, fought back tears, fought the feeling that she had been kissed. All through the silent ride that followed she fought the feeling, knew that it was foolish, that Lance knew nothing whatever about that look, that tone which so affected her. He did not speak again. He sat beside her, and she felt that he was thinking about her, felt that his heart was making love to her—hated herself fiercely for the feeling, fought it and felt it just the same.
“It’s just a way he has with him!” she told herself bitterly, when he swung the team up in front of the section house and helped her down. “He’d have the same way with him if he spoke to a—a rabbit! He doesna mean it—he doesna know and he doesna care!”
“Thank you, Mr. Lorrigan. It
was very kind of you to bring me.” Her voice was prim and very Scotch, and gave no hint of all she had been thinking.
“I’m always kind—to myself,” laughed Lance, and lifted his hat and drove away.
RIM O’ THE WORLD (Part 2)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN WHICH LANCE FINISHES ONE JOB
In the Traffic saloon, whither Lance had gone to find a fire and an easy chair and something cheering to drink while he waited for the pinto team to rest and eat, he found a sleepy bartender sprawled before the stove, a black-and-white dog stretched flat on its side and growling while it dreamed, and an all-pervading odor of alcoholic beverages that appealed to him.
“A highball would make me happy, right now,” he announced cheerfully, standing over the bartender, rubbing his fingers numbed from the keen air and from holding in the pintos, to which a slackened pull on the bits meant a tacit consent to a headlong run.
“Been to the dance?” The bartender yawned widely and went to mix the highball. “I been kinda waitin’ up—but shucks! No tellin’ when the crowd’ll git in—not if they drink all they took with ’em.”
“They were working hard to do just that when I left.” Lance stood back to the stove. Having left in a hurry, without his overcoat, he was chilled to the bone, though the night had been mild for that time of the year. He hoped that the girl had not been uncomfortable—and yawned while the thought held him. He drank his highball, warmed himself comfortably and then, with some one’s fur overcoat for a blanket, he disposed his big body on a near-by pool table, never dreaming that Mary Hope Douglas was remembering his tone, his words, his silence even; analyzing, weighing, wondering how much he had meant, or how little,—wondering whether she really hated him, whether she might justly call her ponderings by any name save curiosity. Such is the way of women the world over.
What Lance thought does not greatly matter. Such is the way of men that their thoughts sooner or later crystallize into action. The bartender would tell you that he went straight to sleep, with the fur coat pulled up over his ears and his legs uncovered, his modishly-shod feet extending beyond the end of the table. The bartender dozed in his chair, thinking it not worth while to close up, because the dance crowd might come straying in at any time with much noise and a great thirst, to say nothing of the possibility of thirsty men coming on the midnight freight that was always four or five hours late, and was now much overdue.